Tabs

Wednesday, 11 January 2017

In the Jewish tradition there is a concept, hard to define and yet concrete enough, which we know as Ahabath Israel: "Love of the Jewish people..." In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who came from the German Left, I find little trace of this. [...] Would there not have been a place [in Eichmann in Jerusalem] for what I can only describe with that modest German word – "Herzenstakt"?–––Gershom Scholem, Letter to Hannah Arendt, June 23 1963At stake in Arendt’s tactlessness [...] is a crucial,
although often unacknowledged strand in her thought as a whole, namely
the issue of the relation between politics and feeling.